I tell a story from time to time, typically in an interview room. The story is about how I tripped over automated testing at Broadcom. and how it became a key component of my job to maintain it. This story, paraphrased, has become a mantra of mine, and I advocate automation everywhere. Automation is a tool I use to improve my own throughput, code quality and demonstrate completeness in my personal life as well as professionally.

As a quick overview of my career:

at Broadcom I automated testing;

at ASTI Labs I worked on a system that would later automate deployment of test servers;

at Rhythm I automated testing again as well as build deployment;

at Heartwood I automated a full testing framework, that included generation of code that could later be audited manually, knowing that it would undoubtedly never have a humans eye set upon it.

at Fractional I work for a DSP, serving huge numbers of advertisements with only the smallest amount of human curation.

Our mobile marketing platform is 100% programmatic using robust machine learning models to make make the majority of campaign optimization decisions.

I have said this a couple times already, in different forums, but its worth restating – because fuck Donald Trump.

I am not afraid of Donald Trump. My irritation and frustration with this election has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump existing. This election was clearly lost and not won… Observe.

Over the last 30 years of presidential elections you will see that there is a clear trend, where somewhere around 45% of the voting population are just not involved. The reasoning for this is not entirely clear, but undoubtedly there are people that cannot and people that will not.

There is a graph on the right that shows that the independents and other votes that were cast played practically nothing. This election was lost because of the Democratic party being unable to mobilize its base.

Looking strictly at the population of the republican party, though, it is very clear that they are a party of stagnation. There is some growth, but nothing like what you should expect by looking at the rate of growth for the population overall, and definitely not as much variability as with the democratic voters.

For the last 4 elections they have been within 1 million votes of 60M, and the dems have been within 4.9M of 63M. This shows that there were at least 68M voters available, an in reality I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more like 70M or 75M able bodied centrist or better voters. We have clear examples of republicans that turned coat and voted blue, so these numbers are already skewed.

This election was lost because the DNC did not choose a great candidate to compete in this fight for our country. This election was lost because of media having bias towards the sensational. This election was lost because we are sensitive people looking to just get along and don’t want to get mired into a shit-show election, and that is going to have to change.

I will leave you with a comentator’s thoughts, similar but possibly more insightful. I will be back in a bit to explain what I am actually worried about, which might not be what you think.

16 years ago, I remember the election being contentious and hurting. I remember feeling disheartened and disappointed. I remember feeling like the world as going to be on fire. That night ended, and a new day came upon us and our leaders started the process of transition and this was the first time I heard it…

It is now time to come together and unify our people.

I remember it being repeated in 2004, my first official election to vote in, and again in 2008, when Democrats took the white house back with Obama. I heard it again in 2012 when Obama won his reelection bid. And again, I hear this lovely refrain echoing around in conversations and memes all over the web.

A week ago I cast my vote, I watched it not be tallied up, and now I am hurting. Though, not likely for the reasons you think. I went to bed Tuesday evening, hopeful and excited for the future, and I woke up a sexist misogynist cis-gendered male that “doesn’t get it” and needs to “stop being a sore loser”.